Solupay Blog

Signatures are no longer needed for EMV (chip) transactions for all major card types. In our recent article No Signature Required - Card Brands Look to Improve Checkout Times, we discussed some significant changes in the POS industry. At the tail end of 2017, MasterCard, Discover, and AmEx announced that they would implement policies that eliminate the need for signatures in point-of-sale EMV transactions. Visa was initially reluctant to comply, but recently gave up the fight and announced they too will eliminate the need for signatures on EMV POS transactions in North America beginning in April of 2018.

This fall we saw some major announcements regarding changes in the way future POS credit card transactions were going to be processed. In October, MasterCard announced it would no longer require signatures at point-of-sale transactions in the U.S. and Canada beginning in April 2018. Shortly thereafter, Discover announced similar intentions, requiring no POS signatures, expanding this initiative to not only the U.S. and Canada, but also Mexico and the Caribbean. Not to be left behind, AmEx announced in early December it would also implement this changeinApril 2018on a global scale. At this time, VISA is the lone holdout, still requiring signatures atpoint-of-sale.Odds arethe antiquated signature requirementwill bedropped by Visa soonconsidering that it is difficult to provethat the signature was indeed the cardholder’s.

Wow, seems like everything’s changing so fast with payment processing. First, you have ApplePay becoming a strong market player. Then you have the EMV Chargeback Liability shift coming up this fall.

Just one of those is enough to handle. So let’s throw PCI compliance right on top of that! Don’t worry – we got your back. With Solupay's dedicated relationship managers and our overall approach to ensuring PCI with our clients is handled, and not seen as a revenue opportunity, we have made PCI compliance a breeze.

January 1, 2015 marked the official date that PCI DSS 3.0 became mandatory for merchants. There have been numerous articles speculating how this will impact merchants' success at passing compliance with their PCI Qualified Security Assessors (QSA). The new security standards were designed to eliminate the increasing prevalence of large scale breaches, but have caused some confusion and concern in smaller merchants, who struggle balancing costs vs. risks.

In a sneak preview of its 2015 PCI Compliance Report, the managed IT services giant, Verizon, hinted at two key problem areas that cause merchants to fall out of PCI DSS compliance: Struggling to maintain PCI Compliance year round, and firewalls.